Chapter 13
MELODY
Melody was softening.
She noticed it first in the small ordinary gestures of the day: the way her hand reached for her phone without her permission in the middle of making coffee, the way she found herself listening for the buzz of an incoming message on the coffee table, the way she caught herself laughing at something on the television and then realizing a half-second later that she had been laughing at it for him.
There had been a beat, in the middle of the laugh, where her body had turned toward the space next to her on the couch as if to share the joke with her husband.
She missed him.
It had been simpler, in the first several days, to not miss him.
In the first several days, the wound had been too fresh for missing.
Missing required a kind of distance, and the distance had been arriving now in small unbidden installments: a morning where she woke without her chest immediately tightening, an afternoon where she went for a full hour without thinking about the suite, an evening where she caught herself wondering what he was having for dinner and then was annoyed with herself for the wondering.
The annoyance was not enough to stop the wondering.
The wondering went on without her permission, the way certain other parts of her body did.
She was ashamed of missing him. She also understood that the shame was not quite fair.
She had been married to him for almost two years.
Her body knew him the way a body knew a house it had lived in, the way you reached in the dark for the light switch on the wall, the way you knew which stair was the creaky one without counting.
Her body had been reaching for his for years.
It was going to take her body longer than a week to stop reaching.
She had also, she understood, been reading the texts.
Still not replying. But reading them. She had read them again under the quilt on Angelica's couch, and she had read them once more in the morning before her coffee had even cooled. And then there had been another one waiting for her.
Reasons I Love You
The way you make the bed on Sundays upstate with the comforter pulled up crooked on purpose, because you said once that a perfectly made bed looked like no one lived there, and you wanted the room to know we lived there.
Melody had stared at it for a long time.
She had not remembered saying that to him.
She had said it — she knew she had said it, the words were hers, she could hear the shape of them in her own voice — but she had not known he had been listening when she had said it.
She had not known he had filed the sentence away somewhere in the small private cabinet of his head under the heading things my wife has told me about what rooms are for, and the not-knowing had been doing a thing to her all morning that she did not entirely have language for yet.
Then another one had arrived, and she had been at Angelica's kitchen sink washing a mug when her phone had buzzed on the counter next to her. She had dried her hands and looked.
Reasons I Love You
You have never once, in the whole time I have known you, been cruel to a person who could not return the cruelty. I did not understand until today what a rare kind of good that is. I am still learning it from you.
She had set the phone down very carefully on the counter, as if it were something that might break if she moved too fast.
It was the until today that had done it.
I did not understand until today. Something had happened that had made her husband understand a thing about her he had not understood before, and the thing was about her being cruel to people who could not return it, which meant the thing was about someone who had been cruel to someone who could not return it.
Melody had an uncomfortable suspicion, standing at Angelica's sink with the mug in her hand, about who the someone was.
The buzzer went at four twenty on Thursday afternoon.
Melody was on the couch with her feet tucked under her, reading a novel Angelica had pressed into her hands the day before.
Angelica was at work. The apartment was quiet.
The pothos on the windowsill had put out another pale new leaf in the morning light, the third new leaf in a week, and Melody had noticed it when she had come back from the kitchen with her tea and had felt, for a small second, a kind of stupid warm pride in a plant.
The buzzer went.
She looked up. She was not expecting anyone.
Angelica would not be home for another two hours.
The only people who had the address were Angelica, David, Natalie, Fiona the lawyer, and her husband, but her husband had agreed not to come back unannounced.
It occurred to her, with a small cold flash, that he might be breaking the agreement.
She got up and crossed the apartment to the intercom panel. She pressed the button.
"Yes?"
A pause.
Then, smoothly and carefully and unmistakably: "Melody. It's Catherine Winters."
Melody stood very still.
"Catherine."
"Yes. I am downstairs. I would like to speak with you. I understand if you say no. If you do say no, I will not try again. This is the only visit. I wanted you to know that before you decided."
Melody closed her eyes.
She thought about their last contentious phone call.
The voice on the intercom this afternoon was not the voice from that call.
She could not say yet exactly what was different about it.
But something was different. Something had arrived in her mother-in-law's voice that had changed the temperature of the sentences by a degree or two.
"Come up."
She pressed the unlock.
Melody stepped back from the panel. She was in jeans.
A cotton sweater. Her hair was loose on her shoulders.
No lipstick. No earrings. She was, she understood, about to receive her mother-in-law in exactly the clothes her mother-in-law had been quietly judging her for owning, and she was not going to change.
Catherine was not going to get the silk version.
Catherine was going to get the Carroll Gardens version of Melody Carter, because the Carroll Gardens version was the real one, and if Catherine had come here it was going to be on the real one's terms or not at all.
The knock came.
Melody opened the door.
Catherine Winters stood in the hallway in a camel coat and a pair of leather driving gloves, her hair done the way it was always done, her diamond studs the way they were always done, her mouth set in the careful line it was always set in.
Her face, underneath all of it, was not the face Melody had been bracing for.
Her mother-in-law looked older.
That was the first thing. Catherine always looked flawless.
The lines at the corners of her mouth were slightly deeper.
The eyes were slightly tired. There was a faint roughness at the base of her throat that Melody had never seen before, the skin of a woman who had either not been sleeping or had been crying, and crying was not a thing Melody had ever associated with Catherine Winters.
Melody stood aside. Catherine stepped into Angelica's parlor-floor apartment, and Melody watched her mother-in-law take in the room without commenting on any of it.
That was also different. The Catherine of a week ago would have commented on the quilt, or the couch, or the pothos, with a single small sentence designed to diminish the room by half. Today's Catherine did not say anything.
"Thank you for letting me in. I know I don’t deserve to be let in."
Melody did not answer. She gestured to the couch.
Catherine sat. She did not take off the coat. She didn’t ask for anything. She set the driving gloves in her lap, folded her hands on top of them. She looked at the pothos on the windowsill for a moment, and then at her own hands, and then, slowly, up at Melody.
“I’ve come to apologize. I want to say that first, before anything else, because I understand that if you decide in the next minute that you don’t want to listen to the rest of what I have to say, you will at least know that the apologizing was the reason for the visit.
I am sorry, Melody. I’m sorry for the phone call.
I am sorry for every time I have said something in your presence that was designed to make you feel … small.”
Melody sat down, slowly, on the edge of the armchair across from the couch.
She did not trust her face yet. She kept her hands flat on her thighs and looked at her mother-in-law in the careful camel coat and did not speak, because she did not yet know what her own voice was going to do if she tried to use it.
Catherine looked at her hands again.
"My son came to see me. I don’t know if he’s told you. I don’t think I’ve been spoken to in that way in my adult life. I’m not complaining about it. I’m telling you because you should know what happened in that room. My son told me —"
Catherine's voice did a very small thing. It was not a crack. Catherine Winters did not crack. But something in the steady cadence of her voice adjusted by a quarter-degree. Melody, who had spent her life in rooms with women who were holding themselves together, noticed it.
"He told me he loved you more than he had ever loved another human being.
He told me he loved you the way his father should have loved me, and the way I should have let his father love me.
He told me that there was no next woman.
That the part of him that was ever going to marry Vivienne Langley died — that was his word — when he fell for you.
He told me that if you decided to come back to him, he was going to spend the rest of his life being the husband you deserved from the beginning.
And he told me that whether or not you came back, the marriage he had had with you was the only marriage he was ever going to have, and that there was no other version.
There was you. There was going to be the rest of his life lived as the man who was married to you. "
Catherine paused. She looked down at the driving gloves in her lap.
"He told me," Catherine continued, "that I would not be welcome in any room he was in. No calls. No intermediaries."
Melody, on the edge of the armchair, had stopped breathing.
Catherine finally looked up at her.
"I want to tell you something I have not told many people in my life, because I was not raised to tell people things. I love my son. I have loved him since the morning he was born, in a difficult labor I do not talk about, at a hospital in Connecticut, on a gray December morning. I have loved him through every version of him he has ever been. I have loved him so much, Melody, and so badly — because love can be done badly, which is something my mother did not teach me and I did not teach him — that the loving became about protecting him from certain kinds of women, because I had been told, for the whole of my life, that certain kinds of women were the threat. I don’t think I understood until yesterday that I had been applying that category to you.
I told myself, for the whole of your marriage, that I was simply looking out for his interests.
I told myself that the cool sentences at the dinner table were the appropriate work of a mother who loved her son.
I told myself that on when I called you.
I told myself that I was being a mother. "
Her voice did the small thing again.
"I was not being a mother. My son is right. What I did was cruel. I’ve been cruel to the woman who makes my only son happy. Happy."
Melody's hand moved, involuntarily, to her throat. She did not speak.
"I have been a bad mother to him on this exact subject," Catherine said.
"I have been a bad mother-in-law to you.
I cannot fix this with a simple apology.
I understand that. I am not here to be let off.
I am not here to ask you to come back to him.
I would not presume. That conversation is between the two of you, and I have forfeited any right to have an opinion about it. "
Catherine stood up.
"I want to say one last thing, and then I am going to go. I have taken up enough of your afternoon."
"All right."
"My son loves you in a way I have not seen a man in this family love a woman since — I am not sure I have seen it at all. I think my father may have loved my mother that way, for a while, before I was old enough to know what I was looking at. I think it may have skipped a generation. I want to tell you that the way he loves you is not the question in front of you. I don’t want you to think that I am here to tell you that he was always going to come around.
I am here to tell you that he has come around — that I watched it happen in my own morning room yesterday.
The man who walked out of my house is a man I have not met before, and he is the man you are now going to have to decide whether or not you want.
He is a different man than the one you left.
That is the fact I am giving you. I am not asking you to do anything with it. "
Catherine took a breath.
"You make him happy. I did not understand how much until now. I’m sorry I did not see it sooner. I’m sorry I made it harder for him to show me by being the kind of mother who had to be shown. I’m — I am so sorry, Melody. I am so sorry."
Catherine closed her eyes and then composed herself. She picked up the driving gloves she had set down on the couch.
"Thank you for letting me in. If you decide to write to me, or to call me, or to have a conversation with me at some future point, I’ll be available, and I will listen, and I will not be the woman I’ve … been."
She walked to the door of the apartment. Melody did not get up; she was unable to. She did not trust her legs. Catherine paused at the door.
"Melody."
"Yes?”
“He’s at the apartment tonight. In case that matters."
The door closed behind her.
Melody sat on the edge of the armchair for a long time. When she finally moved, it was to reach for her phone.